This is a comically destructive missile, quite literally a world ender to an absurd degree

The legacy of project Pluto is that the guidance system for the AGM-69 SLAM was developed into that of another cruise missile people might be familiar with, the Tomahawk.

One way they suggested testing the SLAM was to, seriously, tether it out in the desert and fly it in circles, like a giant wire-controlled model plane.

I first heard of Project Pluto from a story that Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine ran back in the 80's. They gave it the nickname "The Flying Crowbar". Simple, deadly and as durable as "a bucket of rocks". Even the engineers at the time were saying "do we REALLY want to build this f*****r??"

There was also a U.S. program to develop nuclear-powered jet engines for use in aircraft. A massive test rig (about three stories tall) they used is on display at the EBR-1 Atomic Museum near Arco, Idaho. It's a long way from anywhere but you'll see stuff you never imagined existed.

The USA also had hypersonic missles in the 60s. It was called the Sprint it was a Mach 10 nuclear warhead ABM.

SLAM, had at its core, the first of the modern High Operating Temperature ceramics. Development of the ceramics and testing of them was a major part of the project. The reactor used plutonium to super heat air rammed through the ceramic core.

MAD was what we got. I remember growing up about a mile from a SAC and a mile from a Boeing assembly plant. By the time I was 8 I had found out that my house was in the crater if we fought the Russians. At that point this formerly innocent child realized that he was not going to make it through a nuclear conflict. No matter what the newspaper said, personally I was going to lose that war.

Ah yes, the flying crowbar

Worked at LTV in the 60's. Was planned to be launched from Alaska. China and Russia were safely in the crosshairs.😂👍🇺🇸

I read an article about it in one of the early issues of AIR & SPACE mag. It was a scary thing, and still is.

Amazing work as always. One of my favorite channels on KZfaq.

I love that Coors was involved in the process.

9:28 Can we all just stop and pay respects to the bravery and sacrifice of the close in air support and monitoring preformed by these pigeons.

The history of nuclear weapons in 16 minutes. wow.

You launch it from near shore, over the ocean. You don't start the reactor until it's a few miles out to sea. Then you enter soviet airspace from over the poles, or the Pacific. Still crazy, but not crazy because you irradiate your territory. It's a weapon only usable in the global nuclear war, so the incidental radiation it emits probably wouldn't be noticed when you consider the fallout that thousands of tens of nuclear weapons will cause.

Saw you on Twitter and I subscribed instantly. Great channel! THANK YOU!

There was briefly available for sale a plastic model kit. You can still find posters of some of the blueprints. I often think of putting such up for cube art where I work. Right next to the Project Orion design proposals.

Thank you for being both informative and entertaining.

Keep us up to date man! Thank you

It occurs to me that a nuclear ramjet would be useful for exploring the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and maybe Venus.

There was a couple of UFO encounters back in the 60s that left an above average radiation. There was a whole section of asphalt road removed after one of these. Probably coincidence.

Dude for a KZfaq video. This is so information, and so well done. Hats off to you sir 👍🏼

It’s never a war crime the first time

I can't believe something like this was actually being designed at one point. That's wicked scary 😨

Thanks man, that was a great one

Very informative, thanks for sharing 💪🏾💪🏾💪🏾

Fascinating piece! Well done to the creators!

SLAM- the project the US never should have quit

Maybe i missed it in the video, but if all those extra rockets attached to the SLAM missile are just boosters to bring it up to speed. And with the actual missile being mostly hollow, as ramjets tend to be, where on earth did it store all these other "mini" nukes?

Fascinating topic. Great vid

"...powered by an unshielded nuclear reactor that would practically rain onto the ground as it flew..." Malcom Reynolds: "REEEEVERS!!!!"

Don't know the exact date, but there was a movie that was made that pretty much had a scenario of this particular missile. The scenario was that every so many minutes it flew around the earth and in doing so each time it created a burned bath that everything was incinerated.

NB-36 was also a test platform for a nuclear propulsion engine. Although, the method was different.

This is easily the most American thing I've ever seen in my life and i couldn't be more proud

I would not doubt it for a second that we don't have nuclear warheads in satellites right now

As a student of modern capabilities, what fascinates me even more than nuclear arms is the concept of MAD applying to conventional warfare at any scale above brush-fire conflict. Considering the conventional capabilities today out-class defensive capabilities no "full scale war" would do anything except annihilate those involved, primarily their "means to conduct war". The casualties would be so high, the materiel loss as well, would mean that any large scale engagement is a loss for both parties. The offensive weapons setup in the defensive posture of Taiwan would annihilate most of China's attack... however, China would also do the same to Taiwan's weapons. The same goes for NATO vs the Federation. Both possess firepower in the conventional sense that make taking or holding positions impossible and that any attack would likely succeed but itself be wiped out. These were lessons learned from WWI, WWII, and Korea. We found out that as our conventional arms progressed that the ability to produce materiel and train soldiers began to fall behind the loss rate. Industrial War became, untenable. It is even more so today. Instead the nations decided on trade conflicts and in many cases political BUYING of nations vs any kind of open warfare. Wars didn't end, they just changed form to one which enabled them to be prosecuted without total destruction, without even accounting for nuclear weapons. So small brush-fire conflicts and asymmetrical conflicts in "client states". A basic example of this in practice is take two fleets. Both fleets have ships which can launch 6+ anti-ship missiles at a salvo. Both fleets have ships with anti-missile defense systems which can only defeat about 2-3 missiles at a time. Each ship in both fleets cannot take more than one missile hit before being out of action. Or most AT Missiles can kill the best tanks in service in one hit. Most combat teams have more than one. Even light armored vehicles with such missiles can take out a much more expensive tank. The tanks can easily take out the light armored vehicle. It becomes mutual destruction since both actions are delayed or a 3rd party fires on the survivor of the initial fight. Soldiers are incapable of holding terrain with cover penetrating delayed fuse air-burst projectiles on the field, let alone fully automated small robotic vehicles that deploy such weapons without soldiers being even on the combat field. Trenches, concrete walls, nothing offers cover as the weapons on both sides can easily defeat this. This will result in massive casualties. You try to take an area and take it, only to have the counter offensive wipe you off the location as easily as you did those who held it first. It makes a "World War" at this time, an insane idea, one which will ensure the economic destruction and de-peopling of any nation foolish enough to engage in unlimited warfare... again not even accounting for atomic weapons. This makes our current situation all the more dangerous as we have nations whom are quite willing to start the fire because their political power is slipping as their economies crash and their totalitarian edicts become more unfavorable. They are in a position where they have to do something to distract the population.. or very angry people will remove them from power, justly.

Saw the title and thought AGM84E. As an analyst in Desert Storm, I got assigned to an onsite BDA project to document targets hit with PGM. The SLAM(we knew it as the Harp-X) was one of the weapons. I remember being held outside one of the sites, while the SF security escort and the two 'civilian observers' retrieved and locked up some debris in a safe and kept it under armed guard until it got on a plane.

Fun fact The original nuclear bomb and the Fatman Nagasaki weapon weighed over 10,000 lbs and used about 14 lbs of plutonium, which was surrounded by explosive lenses and was the size of an aircraft piston engine. Less than 20 years later nuclear scientists figured out how to build a plutonium implosion weapon small enough for an artillery piece that while not light could be picked up by one burly soldier. By the 1970's Russia / USSR had developed plutonium implosion bombs that were housed in backpacks like the kind hikers use. A scientist from Los Alamos said they could build a bomb small enough to use as a hand grenade, but they'd need someone suicidal enough to throw it

Great report - needed it a year ago!

Was looking at the video and thought sucks being those troops walking toward the mushroom cloud with no NBC gear. Wonder how many developed issues due to that. A lot of stupidity happened during the cold war. All i can say to those servicemen is thankyou for your service.

It would need receivers to detect radars in operation that was unaffected by the Gamma Rays.

Excellent stuff bro

I remember the Hound Dog missiles hanging under the wings of my father’s B-52.

Why is this being described as insane? From a physics standpoint there's nothing to say it would work. If you're sending a nuclear warhead around the globe then sending in via a nuclear powered missile doesn't sound outrageous.

The nuclear bombs of the 1940's pale in destructive energy to the hydrogen bombs in use today. The whole reason we worked on them is because it was decided that Atomic weapons (fisson only) were actually not feasible as a deterrent in any real sense since you'd require too many of them to do any real damage to an enemy.

Enjoyed your video and I gave it a Thumbs Up as a support

The U.S has Electromagnetic Fusion Contain Engine Technology. This motor on a missile makes it the deadliest of all missiles in the world. If the U.S. has indeed been given the Technology from David Adair. The missile is nearly instantaneous. Once fired it’s like the sun, the power is incredible and the missile would take moments not 30 minutes to reach Russia. Far faster then Hypersonic missiles.

If you're not familiar with the term "nuclear triad" you're not alone. Former President Trump had never even heard of the nuclear triad while he was going around saying things about how he "knew more about The Nuclear" than anyone else.

Great article. You never fail to impress me. Thank you.

Seeing that "Coors Ceramics" logo brought me back. My dad was sub-contracted out from RTI to other companies and many military branches of the US. I was cleaning out the garage a month ago and came across a plastic thing that held something and it had the Coors Ceramics logo on it. He even did work for NASA for a couple of the space missions and even some cold war stuff on calculating how far and how much of a payload the Soviets could fly over here. I had to torture him to talk about stuff like that lol.

I think the biggest problem was navigation: Can’t use GPS, because satellites only just got invented. Can’t do anything that requires any processing power, because it needs to run on a portable 60s computer. Inertial guidance would work… briefly. Nuclear submarines of the era used it, and ended up wildly off course as a result. Can’t imagine hypersonic low level flight and it’s associated vibrations would help. Apparently they planned to load it with best guess radar maps of the USSR, and have it navigate by comparison between its radar and those radar maps. Even if such a system could be made to work, as I understand it their guesses of those maps where so hopelessly inaccurate SLAM would have become hopelessly lost and bombed basically random locations.

U.S.studied it, but never built it. Russia actually built at least 1 and launched it to spew radiation all over. I think the Russian weapon was crazier because they were insane enough to actually build and use one.

Holy shit. The whole thing from nose to exhaust is deadly. Literally 5 of these babies would shit on an entire continent in one flight. 😳

Some of that footage is used for a Remy Zero song " Impossibility". My Uncle worked for Coors geochemistry.

Given the Russian use of hypersonic missile in the Ukraine and their testing of nuclear powered missiles do you think the US may develop a cleaner version of the 1950's era SLAM?

So far I haven't seen anyone else wondering if this could have been launched from space using an orbital launch platform or some other type of spacecraft. By the time it entered the atmosphere it would already be going at a pretty good clip. If it was built now, I'm sure it would have a much better navigation and targeting system onboard.

The US had a 4 year window to deal with Russia when it had nukes and Russia didn’t. Here we are 80 years later still locked in a conflict that could have been ended in a matter of weeks. The kicker is, it had just seen how quickly Japan surrendered.

I worked the Navy SLAM project in the 90's Standoff Land Attack Missile which was Basically a Harpoon with a TV Seeker head

With that range that's a lot of opportunities to find it especially if you can detect the radioactive crumbs it leaves. Trails turn into patterns that can be predicted?

Kinda reminds me of the atomic hand grenade: The idea was dumped because nobody could possibly throw it far enough and survive.

We should’ve listened to general Patton! Never should’ve allowed the soviets to progress to nuclear tech. The US had a narrow window/opportunity to conquer the world and have a global empire.

It's hilarious now to think about how batshit crazy the SLAM is. But back then. Yeah, seems legit. Full send. God, what a different time

It is usable as a second strike weapon.

3:43 the lads get out of their trenches and walk towards a nuclear explosion that they can visually see. Wonder what happened to them

Who needs a big stick when you could Wield a tree trunk?

How creative man is when it comes to destruction

I had an astronomy professor at college who said astronomists had a theory that shortly after, in cosmological time, intelligent life develops in the universe it destroys itself with nuclear weapons.

That explosion in 2019 killed 5 of their scientists. Let's hope it was a major setback to the program.

The tac nuke cannon movie at 4:45 couldn’t be more quintessential.

Sounds really good not as a weapon but for space flights.

Doomsday weapons are always interesting, if terrifying... Could you cover other such systems Poisiden, Dead Hand, a potential cobalt bomb (which is way more 'doomsday' than other system: irradiating the entire planet for decades... Yikes.)

What really will blow your mind is what they are doing now and how destructive the systems that they have now. The rail gun is a crazy gun that doesn't use any explosives at all and can cause some big time damage just with canetic energy. I think that one of the new tri hule ships has one of the guns on it now. The last time I heard they were trying to get the rail gun to fire over the horizon accurately and they were close to doing it a few years ago. But it doesn't have the same kind of power that this missile had.

"Come on and SLAM! Welcome to the jam!" 🎶

Yep this it definitely the most dangerous weapon in the world

While its true that some cheramic componenet was used in the engine, it was not entirely ceramic. The reactor tubes was made of nickel alloy and the reactor duct was made of Hastelloy C, and the controll rods was made of Hafnium. The base block maximum temperature was calculated to 2430F, while, yes, very hot, compare to modern jet engines, really not far of, pretty much on par. Most of the subsystems was cooled to just under 2000F. One of the features of the engine is that it use neutron reflectors enable it to be very small, this would also limit the neutron loss from the engine, really not making it that radioactive. The component that was made of ceramics is the moderators becasue they would sustain the most heat (~2500F), made out of Beryllion oxide. The idéa that the engine would produce a lot of radioactive dust i can´t find any evidance for. This seams to be one of those things that was made up in the 70tys. There is no reason to believe it would lose part of the integral part of the reactors. Of cause, the air passing throw the reactor would be highly irradiate, and there for radioactive, this is not that much of a problem that people might believe. The half-life of irradiated oxygen is only 26 seconds, of nitrogen its only 7 seconds and 109 minutes for Argon. The only thing left is the 0.0015% carbon that is tied up on CO2 that does have a longer half life, about 5000 years.... The so called .. Carbon 14. The thing is, carbon 14 is really not that dangerous, we eat it every day in rather large quantities. The relative smal amounts made by the slam would not really change that outcome. So you might believe i´m guessing, well i´m not, we know this is true for sure, becasue open circuit air cold reactors have actually been tried on mass. Wind-scale reactors was used for years on in UK with really very little radiation.. that is.. until the fire. What happen in the fire was that the fuel roads start breaking apart and flying away as dust. The filters in Windscale was not a radiation filter, but rather a dust filter, it was there to collect irradiate dust, not actually irradiate air. Prior to the fire, the filters really didn´t to anything. The claims of 100-240 deaths is not from scientific literature, but rather from activist literature. We know now from Chernobyl that what we fist should see in a radiated environment is thyroid cancer with children. This is a good indicator because its very uncommon. By the way, don´t listen to people saying "5 time increase in thyroid cancer".. When they say that its from 0.2 on average a year to 1 one specific years.. If we see nothing over 50 times increase in thyroid cancer for children, there is really nothing there. Thyroid cancer is fairly easy to treat and most children (like over 99%) survive. Typically we should suspect 1/10 (or less) cancer death in low level population wide cancer than thyroid cancer with children Thyroid cancer after windscale was in the single digits for years after, indicating that the amount of cancer death increase have to be way lower than 100-240 people

I’m no peace nick and I’m surely no nuclear warhawk. However, I think this missile was an object of real insanity by those “thinking they would protect us”. I am glad cooler heads finally prevailed because the mentality for such a weapon reminds of the man riding a hydrogen bomb down to its target in Doctor Strange Love.🤡😂

What an insane weapon.

What an excellent acronym for a weapon 😊

The military leaders at the start of the nuclear arms race, like General Curtis LeMay came from a World War where even atomic bombs were not as deadly as the fire bomb raids over populated areas like Tokyo. If a raid that killed 10,000 was "good", wouldn't a raid that killed 30,000 or 100,000 people in a "militarily significant area" be better? And there was always something militarily significant to be bombed. And why take so many planes, air crew, maintenance and logistics assets to drop thousands of fire bombs (incendiary bomblets) when one big nuke would work as well. Just have to make sure your nuke is bigger than their nuke, and some of your nukes survive their first strike (because you would "never" strike first, right?) to be able to nuke them 'til they glowed. So bigger is better, more is never enough, and fastest of all is way too slow.

Hypersponic is proabably the most overblown tech since the cavitating torpedo. Please do not compare them with Atomic Weapons.

After puberty, 13 or 14 years old. Grade 8 or 9 we used "the bomb will drop before I will" as excuse for vice. First smoke, first drink and hopefully that's all. We lived 15kn from Niagara Falls, we saw the documentary on Nukes and priorities. We were 20 seconds before being in shadow only, 20 sec blinded by the light. Seeing each other in xray for a nanosecond. It was a mantra from the 60's. We were cool in our burgeoning.

I like how you put in perspective the past leaders saw 2 world wars

Great, a flying Chernobyl. This decade just keeps getting better and better.

The first nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was technically speaking,a dud. Approximately 1/3 of the fissile material actually detonated. The shotgun style of bomb was not that effective,as horrible as that sounds. The next one, that was dropped on a suburb of Nagasaki. There were a number of japanese citizens who survived Hiroshima,and ironically, took shelter in Nagasaki. Another fact that always stuck with me, among the survivors, if they were exposed to the flash, what they called the Pika, if they wore white, they were burned but survived, whereas if they wore black, they were incinerated. White reflects light, black absorbs. Info from the book 'THE LAST TRAIN TO HIROSHIMA

Thanks again🇺🇸

All ICBMS are hypersonic they have speeds of up to mach 25 at reentry. The thing that makes the new hypersonics so dangerous is maneuverability while at hypersonic speed to evade air defense systems.

Skip to minute 5 ! Thats when he finally talks about the rocket! You can thank me later!😉

Please, with deepest respect to the excellent research put into this video and the equally good footage, try to avoid terms like "craziest" missile, and "insane" design. The depth of investigation that went into this video deserves more than the near-illirerate hyperbole that's normally used by much younger, less informed people. It's a serious subject, albeit fascinating, and your coverage is way too good to downgrade it at the outset. Cheers!!

I think the Nike missile system was crazier because they planned to use nuclear missiles to shoot down incoming nukes so even if they shot them all down there would be fallout over the major cities they were protecting. The arcade game Missile Command was how it was supposed to operate like and the worst part is they actually deployed it.

I was very fortunate to have worked in the START II Treaty. We destroyed many GLCMs (USAF) and the Army with their Patriot batteries in Germany. We did have a respectful and working relationship with the Russians. I certainly learned so much more about or Nuclear Triad

I cannot believe we've made it through all of the years without this weapon..

You maniacs! You burned it up! Damn you! Damn you to heck!

Well done video

15:22 beautifully said

Pure insanity!

Couple of these and a handful of cobalt bombs and it's game over for mankind.

Very cool topic.

Great video as always.

all war should be a pillowfight and a handshake